Wednesday, February 22, 2017

Karaite congregation expands in California

Some 800 Karaite Jews live within driving distance of Daly city, a suburb of San Francisco. Their synagogue complex is currently undergoing expansion, with a new library to be named after Joseph Abdel Wahed, co-founder of JIMENA, a''h. This Jewish News of North California article by David Wilensky explains about Karaism and its differences wih rabbinic Judaism. (With thanks: Boruch)

Show up on a Shabbat morning at Congregation B’nai Israel
in Daly City, and — if you’re a typical American Jew — you will see
plenty that’s familiar. At the front of the sanctuary is an ark, and
inside the ark are several Torah scrolls. There is a memorial wall at
the back, listing the names of the community’s lost loved ones. Near the
entrance is a rack of tallits.

It is a custom among Karaite Jews to pray kneeling on the ground, as seen
here in the sanctuary of Congregation B’nai Israel in Daly City.
(Courtesy/Kararite Jews of America)

But before you come in, you must remove your shoes, as Moses did when
he approached the Burning Bush. Examine the rack of tallits, and you
will find that the fringes are knotted and wrapped in an unusual way. In
front of the pews, there is an open space covered in rugs. Some
worshippers sit or kneel on the floor; when they bow, they touch their
heads to the ground. The prayers follow a different structure, and the
sound is very Middle Eastern.

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Introduction

In just 50 years, almost a million Jews, whose communities stretch back up to 3,000 years, have been 'ethnically cleansed' from 10 Arab countries. These refugees outnumber the Palestinian refugees two to one, but their narrative has all but been ignored. Unlike Palestinian refugees, they fled not war, but systematic persecution. Seen in this light, Israel, where some 50 percent of the Jewish population descend from these refugees and are now full citizens, is the legitimate expression of the self-determination of an oppressed indigenous, Middle Eastern people.This website is dedicated to preserving the memory of the near-extinct Jewish communities, which can never return to what and where they once were - even if they wanted to. It will attempt to pass on the stories of the Jewish refugees and their current struggle for recognition and restitution. Awareness of the injustice done to these Jews can only advance the cause of peace and reconciliation.(Iran: once an ally of Israel, the Islamic Republic of Iran is now an implacable enemy and numbers of Iranian Jews have fallen drastically from 80,000 to 20,000 since the 1979 Islamic revolution. Their plight - and that of all other communities threatened by Islamism - does therefore fall within the scope of this blog.)